Sex, lies and Bill Clinton’s book (THE FAR LEFT REVIEW OF "MY LIFE")

Disclaimer: this is for the purposes of humour only - apparently the far left thinks about as highly of Sideshow Bill as we do. Ivan

MY LIFE is an extraordinary book that should be read and reread by every socialist. Of course, we mean My Life by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. My Life by Bill Clinton, on the other hand, is pompous piece of junk--lies and distortions served up with Clinton’s teary-eyed smile, rather than trademark snarl that we’re used to from George Bush.

Since starting the whirlwind publicity tour to promote his autobiography, Clinton has done his best to seem high-minded. He claims to be interested in the "big issues" he faced while in the White House--the Middle East, Kosovo, health care. But predictably, the headlines about Clinton revolve around the sex scandal that almost drove him from the White House.

No interview or talk show appearance was complete without a somber Clinton recounting how sorry he is for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. This from a man who had the gall to lecture single mothers living in poverty about "morality" and "family values."

But consensual sex in the Oval Office wasn’t a crime. Bill Clinton’s real crime was his part in Corporate America’s war on working people and the poor. His real crime was to continue the U.S. genocide against the Iraqi people with an eight-year-long string of military attacks and a devastating economic blockade.

His real crime was to leave behind a trail of broken promises on all of the programs or stands he promised to take in defense of unions, women’s rights, gays and lesbians, civil rights for African Americans, and on and on.

In his interview with CBS News’ Dan Rather to plug My Life, Clinton claimed that his two great "accomplishments" were "the creation of 22 million jobs" during his presidency and the toppling of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic after the NATO war. As usual, Clinton’s puffed-up rhetoric had only a passing acquaintance with the truth. The famed job creation of the "Clinton recovery" obscured the fact that large numbers of those jobs were concentrated in low-wage sectors. Corporate America, meanwhile, continued swinging the layoff ax even as it enjoyed record profits.

The 1990s were a bonanza for the super-rich. As liberal economist Lester Thurow wrote halfway through the decade: "No country without a revolution or a military defeat and subsequent occupation has ever experienced such a sharp shift in the distribution of earnings as America has in the last generation."

As for the 1999 NATO war over Kosovo, Clinton claimed that he was unleashing the U.S. military machine to stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosvar Albanians by Serbs. But the NATO slaughter only escalated the refugee crisis in Kosovo.

And when the war ended, Albanians carried out a reverse ethnic cleansing against Serbs in Kosovo--under the noses of U.S. and other Western "peacekeepers." The dictator Milosevic was overthrown--but more than a year after the war, and as a result of a mass uprising of ordinary Serbs, not anything that Bill Clinton did.

Clinton’s book and publicity tour are designed to buff the former president’s image--nothing more. Democrats hope the Clinton hype could inject some excitement into the brain-dead campaign of John Kerry--who is every bit as conservative as Clinton, but less capable of appearing to be an actual human being when he comes in contact with voters.

The real legacy of Clinton should be an object lesson to anyone willing to put their hopes in Kerry. As Malcolm X liked to say, if you put the Democrats first, they will always put you last.

Ivan, does the book cover any of Bill's years behind the "Iron Curtain?" I have always been curious about this long episode in Bill's life. Who paid? Where exactly did he go? (I know he was in Prague in '68!) What for? Was he CIA? Was this supposed to get him off the hook on the Oxford Rape thing? Anybody know?

Bill had been Fulbright's page. What's the connection? When the book is remaindered (around August 1) I would be tempted to go $4.95 if I could be certain it covered even his take on these events. Bill is one of those weird Americans (Strobe Talbot, Richard Holbrooke, etc. etc.) who spent an awful lot of time as guests of the Russkis in those days.

And what about his years at Georgetown Foreign Service School, while he was on Fulbright's staff? What was his record there? Like his medical history, there is a lot about Bill Clinton that should be fairly common knowledge and a matter of record .... but ain't.

PS, I will also pay many rubles for a copy of his KGB File, as EVERY visitor to the Soviet Union had one. Wonder why some enterprising ex-aparatchnik doesn't try to sell that!

Even the homosexuals do not seem enamoured of Clinton's epic tome:

Gay readers should start a national book club and trade tips on what to read at the moment. We could call it Gays Into Reading Literature Seriously (GIRLS). A Web site in the spirit of Craigslist could be formed where we could trade lit tips. Heck, I’ll even start the ball rolling. This week I walked into a Barnes & Noble, headed to the new releases section, and randomly picked five books (based on their covers) to see if they were gay-worthy. The titles crossed the political and cultural spectrum: David Sedaris’s uproarious Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim; Bill Clinton’s much-hyped My Life; Plum Sykes’s seemingly campy Bergdorf Blondes; Donna Brazile’s biography, Cooking With Grease: Stirring the Pot in American Politics; and Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere by Washington Post scribe Hank Stuever. ...

I desperately wanted to like My Life by President Bill Clinton (Knopf, $35), but it has the denseness of a college textbook. At 957 pages, it should come packaged with a bottle of Visine as readers trudge through a number of dense sections. It’ll be a worthy record for future historians. Maybe the 42nd president should have named his book I Went Here, Saw That, and Gave This Speech. What does Clinton have to say about gay equality? Very little. Missing entirely, as best I can tell through my glazed-over eyes, are his onetime buddy and gay adviser David Mixner; his cabinet-level lesbian appointee Roberta Achtenberg; and his White House gay adviser Richard Socarides.

Clinton devotes a few pages to the fight to have gays serve openly in the military, but there’s no behind-the-scenes look at his 1996 decision to sign the antigay Defense of Marriage Act. Mentioned only in passing are his attempts to court gay voters in the 1992 race and his work to increase HIV/AIDS funding. There are some fascinating moments scattered throughout the book, especially when Clinton delves into his childhood, explains his ability to compartmentalize his life, takes swipes at Republicans and Ken Starr, and has to sleep on the couch after admitting to Hillary that he fooled around with Monica Lewinsky. Advocate

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